In a 1964 campaign rally in Providence, RI, Lyndon Johnson, standing on the hood of a car and armed with a bullhorn, summed up the Great Society for the assembled masses: “I just want to tell you this–we’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few.”
40 years later, in the Wall Street Journal, William Voegeli attempted to narrow things down a bit:
The Democrats’ problem is not that they, like “Seinfeld,” are a show about nothing. It’s that they are a show about everything, or anything. (At one point, the Kerry-for-president Web site referred to 79 separate federal programs he wanted to create or expand.)
Ruy Teixeira says that after 2004, “the bigger question is: What do the Democrats stand for?” Here’s a better and bigger question still: What do the Democrats stand against? Tell us, if indeed it’s true, that Democrats don’t want to do for America what social democrats have done for France or Sweden. Tell us that the stacking of one government program on top of the other is going to stop, if indeed it will, well short of a public sector that absorbs half the nation’s income and extensively regulates what we do with the other half. Explain how the spirit of live-and-let-live applies, if indeed it does, to everyone equally–to people who take family, piety and patriotism seriously, not merely to people whose lives and outlooks are predicated on regarding them ironically.
Until those questions are answered, until Americans have confidence about the limits liberalism will establish and observe, it’s hard to see when the Democratic narrative will again have a happy ending.
Well, the narrative certainly had a happy moment in November of last year, but to govern is to choose — and in a new piece at the American Spectator, Quin Hillyer attempts to define what the left actually believes in…before hilarity ensues.
(H/T: OJ)
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